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State prison inmates are protected by a federal law that bans discrimination against the disabled, the Supreme Court ruled today. The law applies to any state or local government agency and does not exclude prisons, the court said. The unanimous ruling lets a former Pennsylvania prisoner sue over his exclusion from a boot camp program that could have shortened his sentence.

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A south Washington condominium association will pay $550,000 to a black resident who sued the association for failing to put an end to racial slurs directed toward her by a neighbor. The association will also buy back her condo for $52,000. Before the case was settled, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ruled that condo associations are covered by the Fair Housing Act, signalling to the condo association that they would have an uphill battle to avoid liability.

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Attorneys for the Toledo Fair Housing Center are asking for fees totaling $1.5 million and $350,000 in expenses in connection with the center's lawsuit against two Nationwide Insurance subsidiaries. The 5-year-old lawsuit in Lucas County Common Pleas Court was settled in April, just before it was to go to trial, with the insurance company agreeing to pay $3.5 million in claims and toward fair housing programs in the area. Stephen Dane, lead attorney for the housing center, filed the motion Tuesday, including the hours and billing rates for attorneys in Toledo, Washington, and Milwaukee, totaling nearly $1.7 million. Expenses were itemized at $530,000.

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A black hitchhiker was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck in a racially motivated killing by three white men, two of whom have racist tattoos and may have ties to the Ku Klux Klan, authorities said today. The battered body of James Byrd Jr., 49, was found Sunday, the day after he was last seen apparently hitching a ride home from a party. ``All evidence shows it will be racially motivated,'' Jasper County Sheriff Billy Rowles said. He added that Byrd appeared to have been dragged two miles down a road in this East Texas county north of Beaumont.

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HUD filed discrimination charges Monday alleging that a Jefferson County developer refused to sell a house to an African-American couple in two all-white subdivisions. Leonard Riebold, an owner of C & R Construction & Development Co. and Home Construction Inc. in Imperial, allegedly told the couple's agent, Mary Reeves, that she should have known better than to have brought blacks to a "redneck area" in High Ridge, said officials of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In a prepared statement, Riebold denied the discrimination charges, saying he planned to challenge them. "It is not our practice to discriminate against any minority," he wrote.

A Senate subcommittee voted Tuesday to trim President Clinton's planned spending for housing and toxic waste cleanups, signaling election-year spending clashes ahead. In February, the administration proposed cutting housing for the elderly by $524 million to pay for a new program that would give rental housing vouchers to many welfare recipients and homeless, elderly and disabled people. The committee ignored the idea. "You shouldn't have to take your walker and hit the streets with your voucher," said Barbara Mikulski, D-Maryland.

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Forty percent of housing on U.S. Indian reservations is substandard, with many homes too crowded and lacking adequate plumbing, the head of the National American Indian Housing Council said Monday. Reservations, on which an estimated 800,000 Indians live, need 200,000 new housing units immediately, Chairman Chester Carl told the group's convention in Tampa. "In tribal areas, 40 percent of the housing is considered substandard, compared to 5.9 percent of housing generally," Carl said, adding that 21 percent of dwellings were overcrowded and 16 percent did not have adequate plumbing.

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A Wauconda, Ill., couple who allegedly refused to rent one of their properties to an interracial couple has settled a HUD complaint against them for $65,000. Besides allegedly denying the couple the opportunity to rent a home, the landlords also asked testers assigned to contact them by HOPE Fair Housing Center in Wheaton their race and told testers who said they were black that they would not be shown homes.

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The Live Broadcast on the National SuperNOFA will be held this Friday, June 5, from 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM EDT. There are several ways to receive the HUD satellite broadcasts: 1. You can visit a HUD Field Office in your area. 2. You can call in for an audio-only version at 1-888-618-8003. 3. You can view live simulcasts or archived broadcasts in streaming video over the web. Streaming web video requiers a special video player.

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Freddie Mac faces a $15 million race-discrimination lawsuit from a former executive who claims it created a ``hostile work environment'' that subjected black employees to threats and racial slurs. Tony Morgan, Freddie Mac's former director of executive corporate relations, sued Wednesday in U.S. District Court, alleging a ``pattern and practice of intentional discrimination.''